the literary conference (césar aira)

As ever one isn’t quite sure what to make of Aira’s fiendish mind. Is it that of a genius or a madman? This story involves, among things, cloning Octavio Paz and his tie, pirate’s loot, a lecherous writer, big blue worms. All of which occurs at a Venezuelan literary festival. It’s dotty, but it also feels calculated, in the way that extreme improvisation needs to be underpinned by an unlikely coherence. It’s reminiscent of Saer, rather than Borges, lacking the blind man’s love of logic. It’s also reminiscent of Aira’s cinematic compatriot Lucia Seles, another who comes from a small town on the edge of Buenos Aires, with his roundabout tales that engage but infuriate. There’s a fine line between madness, the artistic equivalent of scratching an itch until  you bleed, and otherworldly genius, which the margins of Argentina’s capital seem to provoke. Bolaño describes Aira as one of the best Hispanic writers of his generation in the introduction, and who are we to argue with Bolaño?

meek’s cutoff (d. kelly reichardt, w. jonathan raymond)

Reichardt’s western is a beautiful, immersive take on what it might have been like to be a pioneer on the great trek west. It’s a film of elegant long takes, punctuated by moments of classic western action. The appearance of the Indian, the stand-off, the runaway cart. A party of pioneers finds themselves lead by Meek, a cowboy cowboy, who talks the talk but doesn’t appear to walk the walk, leading them into barren hills as their water reserves diminish. Under the parasol of the question: will they survive or not, the film stumbles forward in their company, with every obstacle that holds up their progress hardwired into the viewing process. An axle breaks and the audience really gets the significance. A steep hill isn’t just scenic, it’s potentially fatal. It’s a masterly treatment of the lost art of the Western, one which unsurprisingly forefronts gender as Michelle Williams emerges as a counterweight to Bruce Greenwood’s macho Meek. However, Reichardt’s treatment of gender is in many ways just another element in the authenticity of her tale, one which insists on a more nuanced take on the historical actualities of the myth. 

voroshilovgrad (zhadan, tr. reilly costigan-humes, isaac wheeler)

Voroshilovgrad is the old Soviet name for the city of Luhansk, which is currently a Ukrainian town under attack by Russian forces. Zhadan’s novel is set not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, when this town, set in a sea of wheat, was something of a Wild West land, bickered over by gangsters, locals and smugglers. The novel follows the journey of Herman who lives in Karkhiv. His brother owns a petrol station, which is a going business, on the outskirts of Luhansk. When his brother disappears to Amsterdam, for reasons which are never entirely clear, Herman returns to his childhood home to take charge. There he finds himself caught up in the shenanigans, going on an increasingly Pynchonesque journey into the netherworld of the border. This is a hallucinogenic space, where the dead walk amongst the living and the living scrap for territory. Once again we are on the farflung edges of European project. Herman has a pseudo job in Kharkiv, working for a nebulous political outfit. The sort of Macjob that so many young aimless people have in the Western world. He has no real need of a petrol station which is being targeted by gangsters, but he finds a cause there, and the cause traps him. At one stage on his journey, Herman finds himself in a travelling convoy of Tibetans and Mongolians, drifting across the Eurasian plain, in the general direction of the EU. This is where the continental plates collide. To the west, Europe, with its property. To the east, Asia, with its vast, uncharted peoples and spaces. Zhadan has Herman tread water in the lawless middle, but it is notable that this lawless middle is a place where finds himself feeling increasingly comfortable. A decade before The Orphanage, Voroshilovgrad offers a more hermetic, dreamy vision of the space that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, one where camaraderie and local feeling still held sway. At the same time it illustrates the porous nature of this frontier between West and East, (perhaps akin to the lands of Pamuk’s Snow), a place whose borders are intangible and, as a result, a recipe for trouble. 

la promesa [the promise] (silvina ocampo, tr suzanne jill levine & jessica powell)

Ocampo’s novel is more of a collection of fragments towards a novel than a novel in its own right. The Promise consists of a series of anecdotes about a succession of individuals who have featured in the writer’s life. As such, it offers a whimsical insight into a lost Argentine world, full of feckless men and confused women, caught up in awkward social relationships which leave the participants feeling frazzled. The novel is constructed around the conceit of a woman falling overboard into the Atlantic Ocean, with her past flashing before her eyes as she wrestles with the waves. It’s a brief novel which shouldn’t be read in a hurry, as each sequence carries its own particular weight, although the fact that Ocampo is better known as a writer of short stories is reflected in the fragmented nature of the text. The detail that Ocampo was working on such a slight novel for over 25 years speaks of the fact that this is an unfinished text, one that was perhaps never destined or even meant to be completed. 

the third reich (w. bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

After an extended Bolaño hiatus, the blog returns to its most-read writer. In times of crisis turn to a sure bet. Unfortunately, Third Reich proves to be strictly minor Bolaño, a long shaggy dog story about a German war games champion who gets stuck in Catalonia when a holiday friend of his girlfriend mysteriously vanishes in a windsurfing accident. This brief synopsis instantly marks the novel out as being in prime Bolaño territory, even more so if it’s added there’s a scarred Latin American beachcomber who plays a prominent role in the narrative. However, the novel itself feels baggy, it’s wide Bolaño, rather than focussed Bolaño. It goes round the houses as it plays out its central device which is a board game reenactment of the second world war between the protagonist and the scarred beachcomber. The second world war took six years from start to finish, and if the novel isn’t quite that long, there are undoubtably moments when it feels as though it’s being played out in order to accommodate the twists and turns inherent in the device. The narrator also tends towards the cold intellectual Bolaño rather than the warm poetic one. One imagines the novel as an earlier work, and in this context it is of course fascinating to see how the writer evolved, how he chiselled his craft, to merge ideas with content with emotion. On the other hand, it might be that this was not an earlier work at all. In which case this kind of ad hoc observation should be labelled as trite and indicative of nothing. 

the blizzard (sorokin, tr. jamey gambrell)

Sorokin is such a curious writer. His novels feel like fantastical B-movies. Full of melodrama and cheap horror. Yet at the same time they feel as though they’re hitting the contemporary Russian nerve. The Blizzard describes a doomed journey by a doctor to deliver a vaccine to a remote town in the depths of Mother Russia. A journey he seems destined to never complete as the conditions conspire to thwart him. Gradually the world the story occupies becomes stranger and stranger. Giants, nano technology, dwarf horses. Meanwhile, deep Russia remains unchanged, a world of vodka and stoves, tiny communities which are islands of warmth in a world of snow. This mish-mash, hotchpotch, is weirdly compelling and ends up feeling entirely allegorical, a telling portrait of a country which seems to concurrently exist in both the past and the future, with the present being of only minor importance.

trust (w. falk richter, tr. maja zade, d. jude christian)

There’s a lot that might be said about the Gate’s production of Trust, a German play with a strong directorial input provided by Jude Christian, an English director, who also acts in the play. You could talk about the success or otherwise of its critique of modern society, which might be astute, or might be a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it. Or you could comment on the play’s influences, a dash of Crimp, a soupçon of Fosse, a flavouring of Ostermeier. You could start to talk about the way in which the staging explores notions of presentation; with the elongated stage itself turned into an evolving installation. Just as Richter’s text explores the way in which narrative ‘presents’ or ‘represents’ its themes, characters, story. Then there’s the whole issue of the fourth wall, the way the writing and the direction plays with it, sometimes putting it up, sometimes taking it down. There’s a whole Hare-ian debate possible about the relationship between the text and the staging.  Even if the text would appear to be willing the director into an appropriation of its words, something Christian has no hesitation in doing, throwing in a whole section on Brexit which can’t have been there in the original German production.

You could talk about all these things, when you talk about Trust, but more than anything i think it’s worth pointing out what a barmily enjoyable show it is. In a world where notions of pleasure, in the theatre and elsewhere, are up for grabs, Trust offers a new way to please old masters. The Barthesian delight in never knowing what’s going to come next: whether the play, with its tenuous narrative, is going to evolve or atrophy, and if it does so, (either), what form will this take and how do we get to the end? Trust reminds us that theatre is an experience which employs a text, rather than being contingent on a text; that theatre has so much more to offer than words (without in any way negating the value of words). 

One suspects that in Germany this kind of production would have none of the novelty that it possesses on a British stage. Which just goes to show the theatrical pleasures we’re missing out on, and emphasises how welcome Trust is, a play that encourages its audience to think about love, society, the importance of dramaturgy, whilst re-calibrating notions of theatrical enjoyment.

murder city [charles bowden]

Murder City

Bowden's book charts events in and around Ciudad Juarez 2008-2009. He grapples with a violence which escalates, from his point of view, into something which is beyond rational explanation. The book is a fierce, quasi-poetic attempt to go beyond the figures and the standard explanations. In many ways, it is a sister-work to the section of 2666 About the Crimes. Like Bolaño, Bowden makes an attempt to de-render literature speechless in the face of the barbarity of the border zone. Both writers insist on documenting the remorseless appetite of the violence, which seems to become almost an entity in its own right, whilst at the same time insisting on the fact that it is something done by and affecting humans, people who in another life might have lived 'ordinary' lives. 

Unlike 2666, Murder City is a work of non-fiction. Bowden seeks out characters and tells their story, from the born-again assassin to the journalist on the run. This journalistic strain goes hand-in-hand with the writer's agonising attempts to find a kind of sense in these stories. In the end he seems to suggest that he sees Ciudad Juarez as a Hobbesian vision of the future, where the daily concerns of modern capitalism are blown away by the anarchic whirlwind of survival and fear. What's the point of fretting about your future when a random act of violence could destroy it at any moment? Ciudad Juarez comes to represent a model of anti-progress, the antithesis of the American dream.  

The book also cuts to the quick about the way in which Mexico has become a narco-state; at the same time debunking the myth of the war on drugs. As Bowden points out, this isn't a war on drugs, rather, it's a war for the drugs trade and its enormous wealth. The army and the police and the state are just as much players in this war as the narcos themselves. Escalante's film Heli depicted this cruel world where the good guys just don't exist. Events in Ayotzinapa only serve to rubber stamp the depiction of Mexico Bowden's anguished book presents. Murder City should be required reading for anyone who wants to begin to get a grip on the hydra-violence which permits the combined forces of evil to not only perpetrate its grotesque crimes, but also do so with a sense of complete impunity. 

C [tom mccarthy]

McCarthy's first novel dazzled. It took the nouveau roman, transposed it to Brixton, adorned it with a British sensibility and kicked some much needed life into the Anglo-Saxon novel. This is his follow-up. Where Remainder appeared to use Robbe Grillet as a model, here the predominant inspiration would appear to be Pynchon. So much so that C sometimes feels like a homage, to the similarly named V, or Gravity's Rainbow. Both in it's account of an unlikely hero traipsing across wartorn Europe and its relentless present tense.

There are worse writers to whom one might choose to pay homage. But C feels as though it is so self-consciously stepping into another’s footsteps that it never quite acquires an identity of its own. Instead, this feels like a book self-consciously in search of its raison d’etre.

There are frequent passages where the research is evident (into the life of a WW1 pilot, or post-war Egypt, for example), but all the research in the world cannot make C run. Whilst apparently a fractured narrative, skipping across the first decades of the 20^th C in a series of precise chapters, its shape is clearly defined, tied as it is to the life of the book's protagonist, Serge Carrefax. Carrefax is something of an emotional vacuum, for reasons the reader understands, (his odd upbringing, his sister's suicide), but the fact that we understand doesn't help to make him interesting. Serge is a nerd whom the novel sometimes likes to suggest is on a covert mission through the semiotic warren of modern consciousness. He further he goes, the less interesting this becomes. Which might mean that his mission is a failure, or it might mean that the modern consciousness is fundamentally tedious.

As a result, C flatters to deceive, constantly hinting at hidden depths which are never plumbed. The same has probably been said of Gravity's Rainbow, only... one cannot say it with complete conviction. The Rainbow is so sprawling, so all-encompassing, that it might just contain the secret of the universe lodged within it. Which cannot be said for C. There are no hidden secrets. Serge listens to the airwaves in expectation but nothing arrives. The book has the feel of a shaggy dog story which gives itself away far too early.

Remainder suggested that McCarthy might be capable of redeeming the British novel, endowing it with what might be termed a European sensibility, welding playfulness to the prosaic glories of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. A detour via Pynchon is not such a bad way to go. But C feels like a staging post rather than a destination. It's a book which seems to be constantly searching for a reason to exist. The punchline, that it doesn't have one, does not quite convince. 

a visit from the goon squad [jennifer egan]

Goon Squad is a dazzling novel, which flips around in time like a dolphin, with a similar degree of grace and look-at-me chutzpah. After having read it, I later discovered that its reputation is already well established. It won its author the Pulitzer Prize and HBO are in talks to turn it into a mini-series.

From Egan’s point of view that’s undoubtedly a good thing. All the same, I’m glad I discovered it without the hype. (Still not all that big in Montevideo, so far as I can tell.) When it came out it was compared directly with Franzen’s Freedom, a book she says, in an interview, she has yet to read; she’ll wait until the hype has died down. Hype compels the reader into taking a standpoint not merely with regard to the novel but also the novel’s reception. (Or the film’s or the song’s etc). For anyone wary of the literary establishment, its approval is a double edged sword. In that context it’s worth knowing that Egan claims to have yomped through years of rejection, that this is no overnight success.

You can see why the book has been struck a chord. It manages to capture an urban overview of the years 1980-2010. The novel is set in New York; San Francisco; a safari in Africa, Naples. But predominantly New York. The fractured narrative (natch) leaps backwards and forwards, riffing like a jazz tune, as it follows first one character then another as they dance through time. Part of the fun of the book is never knowing where you’re going next, whose journey you’re going to be dipping into. The presence or absence of the twin towers is dealt with more effectively and elliptically than in any other work of post-911 literature I’ve come across. These New Yorkers have a frame of reference which is not so very different to a Londoner’s. The music they listen to, the dreams they carry around with them, the disappointments and satisfactions of age. The characters reminded me of people I have known, feelings I have had, none more so than when a group of young New Yorkers find themselves out all night, pushing through to the tragic dawn.

As such, Goon Squad has the feeling of being a touchstone for a generation. It has hints of Pynchon in its sometimes euphoric prose and the name of one of the lead characters, but perhaps more than anything it is reminiscent of another New York novel, albeit one which is on some levels very different, James Baldwin’s Another Country. This comparison perhaps also suggests the book’s Achilles Heel. Where Baldwin’s novel was posited within a radical discourse, Egan’s feels thematically weightless. There is no ‘political’ anchor. (Small P). The final two chapters of the book, both situated in a future where climate change appears to have become an even more dominant issue than it is now, are the first where the novel’s episodic approach starts to feel hollow. These excursions into the what-might-be feel weak in comparison to Egan’s insight into the what-has-been. The resonances of objects; of personal effect and affect as we span the years; this is where the writing feels most vital. The decisions made in adolescence which will shape the span of one’s life for decades.

just between us (w&d rajko grlic, w ante tomic)

Just Between Us is a dry comedy which owes a lot to Schnitzler’s matchless La Ronde, as it follows the fortunes of a group of people all of whom are, according to their respective degrees of seperation, romantically involved with one another. At the script’s heart is the character of Nikola, played by the charismatic Predrag Manojlovic. He is a wealthy married man who leads a double life, with a long-term lover and child living in the same city. He visits her when he is supposed to be abroad on business trips, and their shared joke is that they are in Munich or Oslo or Dubai, or wherever it is he has claimed to be.

There’s something slightly tenuous about this and the narrative often has the feeling of having been fleshed out with the use of Venn Diagrams or an Excel Spreadsheet. Of greater interest, perhaps, is the way in which the film offers a sideways and warm-hearted look at life in the Croatian capital. The angst of the nineties is hinted at, when Nikola mentions how he had to flee to the States, but now these characters are thoroughly integrated into a modern (pre-crash) Europe. The apolitical nature of the film seems almost a declaration of intent: we too can make fuzzy romantic comedies, along the lines of Hollywood or Richard Curtis.

Manojlovic played the father in Kustirica’s When Father Was Away On Business, before the nation state of Croatia even existed. His doleful face seems to carry the wear and tear of history, but it’s all below the surface, hidden away in a locked drawer in his character’s designer apartment. Now that history is done and dusted, serious time can be dedicated to frolicking and romantic escapades; the eternal wheel of duplicitous shenanigans can resume its remorseless grind. 

nostalgia for the light (w&d patricio guzmán)

I was there on 911. When the Palace was  bombed and the President was killed. Or killed himself. Though no-one believes the official story because none of the official stories are credible. I did not fight in the trenches, because no-one did. I was not rounded up by the young men whose anger masked their confusion. I was not taken to the football stadium so I did not see Jara have his hands chopped off or the students shot or endure that strange time standing on the terraces as though waiting for the football match to start, knowing that when it started it only meant the end. Neither did I succeed in mythologizing my experiences when I fled, first to Mexico, then to Europe, then to the Stratosphere.

But I was there, one way or another. Or, rather, I have been there. I have even walked the Atacama desert, seen the stars like nowhere on earth, hunted for traces of lost civilisations as well as traces of the civilisation we have lost.

Because of this, Guzmán’s film, haunting though it is, did not tell me things I did not know. It is not a beautiful film and neither should it be. Neither is it a meditational film, as some say. It is an angry film, and that is at it should be. It has a quiet, hidden anger, with the energy of an exploding star, because Guzmán was on a star that exploded forty years ago and knows how it feels. Because anger is the offspring of pain which is the offspring of events which are what Guzmán lived through and felt and if you have seen his films then you too have lived through and felt these events and all that they then brought forth. Which is why I know I was there. Even if I wasn’t. Which is why his film tells me nothing new. Even though I am glad to have learnt nothing new.

Guzmán points his own telescope into the past. He points it at the desert floor. The light which hits the screen whilst we watch is light which was busy being born forty years ago, finally reaching our eyes.

cerro bayo (w&d victoria galardi)

Cerro Bayo is an affectionate fable from Patagonia. It's a character driven piece which examines a family's coming to terms with the attempted suicide of the grandmother, a suicide attempt which is never fully explained. Instead, the film examines the differing reactions of her two daughters and the way in which various members of the family seek to get to hold of the grandmother's legacy.

The drama is less significant than the gently comic portrayal of these people's way of life. Despite the fact they live with a certain degree of affluence, there's a pining for the big city. One of the daughters live in Buenos Aires, where things are clearly not working out for her all that well. Both the grandchildren have plans to get away. When Ines (played by Ines Efron, the remarkable star of XXY) fails to win the local beauty pageant competition, she is devastated. The fact that she's far from the being the likeliest candidate for the prize never seems to have crossed her mind. Her skateboarding brother feels similarly trapped, but thinks he's found an escape route only to have it snatched away.

At one point the film uses a track by Beirut, an effectively jarring moment, which helps to position it as a comedy of manners which could have played out in any small, isolated community. Fittingly, the film refrains from showing almost anything of the festivities which mark the first snowfall on the mountain. This is a chamber piece which refrains from big dramatic statements as its carefully honed script focuses in on the little dramas which make up the everyday lives of people from three generations. 

nine muses (w&d john akomfrah)

Figures in fierce coats stand braced against the cold. These are the immigrants. The ones who came to this country, left the sun behind, and now have to contend with the snow and the ice, find a place in a new world, join the madness.

There's some riveting camerawork, as these figures face lakes, open roads, the North. This is a portrait of Britain, seen from the skewed angle of the...

Hang on, I thought, about 45 minutes in. That's not Scotland! That's not Loch Maree! All those 4x4s aren't in Britain. Those traffic signs look kind of... American? Indeed, as my learned colleague observed later. It's all part of the metaphor. The immigrant confronting the barren cold... I'd got this. I just thought the barren cold was British. Which is what all the beautifully selected archive footage implies. I mean, this is a film about the experience of being an immigrant in Britain, isn't it?

So the subtlety of the use of Alaska as a metaphor went over my head. It seemed to me that the filmmakers had received a hefty grant and made the most of it. By going to Alaska. This is a point that Nine Muses makes somewhat relentlessly, as the Alaskan footage recurs and recurs and recurs and recurs. It's cold out there. You need a good coat.

This footage is punctuated by the above mentioned archive footage and series of increasingly ponderous readings taken from the "Naxos Classical Archive". After the initial Paradise Lost quotation which seems appropriate, we then get Dante, Hamlet, Richard 2, Beckett and Joyce. All of which succeeds in elevating this film into a work of massive pretentiousness, which, were it to have been done by a German featuring Goethe, Kant et al would probably have been laughed out of court.

There is something refreshing about the director's take and presentation of the immigrant process. Buried deep within Nine Muses, under the snowdrifts, it feels as though there might have been a bold and compelling film. But in the end there's an Alaskan wooliness to the whole endeavour which holes it below the waterline.

post mortem (w&d pablo larraín)

For some of us, and clearly from its undistinguished London screening, we are few, Post Mortem was one of the most eagerly anticipated film releases of the year. A film that warranted red carpets, gala screenings, celebrities telling you how much they loved it. Instead, Larraín's film was playing on the ICA's tiny second screen, in a grainy projection that did it no favours. Before the film started the audience were informed that there was a problem with the tape. They played five minutes of Silvio Rodriguez, which was at least appropriate, before fixing it. The whole thing was something of a verguenza, and one wonders how the film's marketing people, sitting on the work of one of the cinema's most exciting directors, have let this happen.

The pivotal scene in Post Mortem occurs two thirds of the way through the film. Its lead character, Mario Cornejo, (in some ways a prefiguration of Alfredo Castro's character in Tony Manero), is seconded into participating in the autopsy of Salvador Allende. This is the story of a little man caught in history's headlights. The scene itself is swathed in the blackest of humour, with Mario struggling to use an unfamiliar typewriter as his boss dictates his notes. In the film's credits, there's a thanks to Mario Cornejo himself. Larraín has taken this real, unknown man who found himself on the stage of history and fictionalised him, imagining how he got there and, more importantly, the impact his being there had on his already vulnerable psyche.

As a result the film neatly splits into two sections, pre-coup and post-coup. Mario is an apolitical figure. There's clearly turmoil in the streets, but he's more interested in his neighbour, a dancer in a seedy cabaret, who lives with her politically active family. Mario patrols the streets of Santiago in his red bubble car. It's a sullen city, pregnant with disaster, but Mario seems oblivious. Then the coup happens and the film shifts register. It embraces a kind of deadpan baroque, as bodies mount up at the morgue where Mario works, and he and his colleagues struggle to stay sane in the face of horror; not a slasher horror (though it's fascinating the way in which a scene such as the one where Mario drags a gurney stacked with bodies behind him feels like it could have come out of a horror film), but a real, historically documented horror.

As such, the filmmmaker is attempting to do something supremely ambitious: to convey to a modern day audience what those days were like. To recreate history. Not in a documentary fashion, but in a sensory fashion. We start to feel the sense of nihilism that arrived with the coup (and the aftermath of which Tony Manero explores in more depth). Whilst it's a bleak space, its also a strangely comic one; there are no rules, death is flat, matter-of-fact, on the edge of being farcical. Dead people are shot and they are neither more dead nor less so. Mario walks through this landscape like Buster Keaton, po-faced and desensitised. The ending, when it comes, is brutal and revelatory, savagely violent without even a hint of blood being spilt; a ghoulish work of performance art.

Chile remains a society where political divisions between left and right are heartfelt and integrated into the day-to-day. Larraín belongs to one of Chile's most political families: his uncle is part of the right-wing government which has been subject to violent recent student protests that lasted for months. To make a film about the most significant moment in its recent history is therefore a bold step in the first place. To do it in a way which is both oblique and horrifyingly direct is yet more of an achievement. As the immediate influence of the dictatorships recedes in Latin America, its artists begin the process of trying to make sense of the legacy they've inherited. The closing scene of Post Mortem summons up a society that is on the point of shutting itself up for the next thirty years. It's a devastating ending for a film which pulls off the trick of recounting an unlikely narrative about issues of enormous weight within its society whilst developing its own dry, idiosyncratic aesthetic.

attenberg (w&d athina rachel tsangari)

Until about a year ago references to Greece would conjure up images of beaches, sunsets and ruins. It's a long time since Byron went to fight for its freedom. Of course it has been touched by various wars, had its coup d'etats, military rule and revolutions, but by and large Greece has been synonymous with ageless beauty, olives and the good life. For now, however, that image has been displaced. Greece is now a front line on the global economic battleground. Middle class people riot and sleep in the streets. Politicians and financiers regularly speculate about its demise. Economic journalists head there to reveal the shape of a dystopian European future.

In retrospect, Dogtooth, Lanthimos' brilliant movie, seems to have been giving out warning signs. Within a walled garden, all was not what it seemed. Something was going horribly wrong in the Greek state and the chickens were coming home to roost. Tsangari, who has spent a good deal of time in the States, is credited as associate producer on Dogtooth. Attenberg is being marketed in Dogtooth's slipstream and it too bucks against the previous bucolic images of the country.

The film is set in a coastal resort, but it's a coastal resort in Winter. As Morrissey observed, coastal resorts in Winter can be depressing. Even more so when your father is dying of cancer, as is the case with the film's virginal heroine, Marina, played by the impressive Ariane Labed, who somewhat curiously happens to be French, not that you'd notice.  Marina has issues. She’s 23 and she’s never had sex. She practices kissing with her on-off friend, Bella. She imagines her father naked. Together they watch David Attenborough shows (hence the film’s curious title) and sometimes act out as gorillas. When she finally goes to bed with a man, she talks so much it puts him off. This makes for one of the funniest sex scenes ever filmed. It’s almost as though Marina is inhabiting the flip side of the Greek Summer idyll. Her father is an architect who would appear to have helped develop the resort. But the view from the apartments is always grey and unwelcoming.

There’s a hint of the dysfunctional US indie drama here, with a strong female twist. Death is coming and Marina is going to have to cope with her grief. However, in contrast to a North American sensibility, there’s no bittersweet pay-off. Once her father’s ashes have been scattered, the film switches to a long static shot, of little apparent relevance, in what looks like a cement factory. There’s a feeling that the ending is less moving than we would want it to be; but that is also exactly right. In an echo of Dogtooth’s harsh edges, Tsangari flirts with the themes of sentimentality but then resists them, reluctant to give the audience what it wants.

Which is not to say that the film is not warm and sensitively told. Perhaps the one adjective it resists from that compendium of adjectives which describe films which deal with death and sex, is “human”. One gets the impression that Tsangari would prefer the adjective “animal”. Not in a nasty sense, but in the sense that our assumed notions of evolution and progress aren’t quite as valid as we like to think. We manage to make the simple things in life, like sex and dying, incredibly complicated. Which means that the supposed virtues of ‘civilization’ are not as impressive as its marketing.

There are occasional longeurs in Tsangari’s film. But its so full of unlikely and brilliant moments that they don’t matter. Whether the Greek new wave is showing us the future of the European dream or not is open to debate. But it is producing some remarkable cinema.

the faber book of new south american cinema (demetriou matheou)

The first half of Matheou's book has more of the feel of a publisher's vision than the writer's. Matheou is a film critic who's clearly good buddies with Walter Salles. Salles is connected, for reasons the book explains, with a host of Brazilian film-makers. Therefore, Matheou has had privileged access to them. An access which takes the form of a series of interviews, which are brought together in this collection. In a 400 page book, the first 220 are dedicated to Brazil, and most of this is taken up with these interviews which offer a somewhat uncritical perspective on the Brazilian new wave which has evolved over the course of the past twenty years, known as the 'retomada'.

Whilst this offers a host of fascinating insights, the emphasis on the filmmakers' personal accounts of their achievements means this is no Raging Bulls, Easy Riders. Rather, it feels like a sanitised account. The conflict between Lund and Meirelles over the authorship of City of God is alluded to, but only to such an extent that one is lead to suspect there might be a more intriguing story there that hasn't been told. Matheou is reverential in his approach to Salles' work, and those (including many South Americans I know) who feel the Motorcycle Diaries was something of a lightweight, sentimental treatment of the Guevara myth, later surprisingly eclipsed by the Hollywood doyen, Soderbergh, might be disappointed by the author's refusal to even suggest that it was anything other than a masterpiece. The writing doesn't address the issue of how Brazilian cinema is dominated by the perspective of a relatively affluent class. Again, reading between the lines, one of the most intriguing strands is the way in which Salles, Meirelles & co are seeking to overcome their own ignorance through the process of their filmmaking; leading them to explore aspects of the country which remained hidden below the surface of their somewhat sheltered lives. The overall impression of the Brazilian half of the book is of a somewhat cosy relationship between the critic and his subjects, which leads to some fascinating insights, but a sometimes frustratingly worthy account of Brazilian cinema.

What seems apparent is that the writer is less well connected when it comes to the other countries he chooses to focus on, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Peru. This takes up the second half of the book. Matheou writes in less detail about the cinema of these countries and one gets the feeling that he has had to work harder to gain his insights. This communicates itself through his writing. The book becomes less of a showcase for the director's voices and more of a genuine investigation of the causes and subsequent themes of the respective national cinemas. Perhaps it also helps that most of the filmmakers from these countries on the whole come from a younger generation than the Brazilians, with a more restless approach to their work. The device of using interviews continues, but given that the films the directors are discussing are by and large less well known, Demetriou works hard to fill in the gaps for his audience and in so doing provides a strong resume of Southern Cone and Peruvian cinema over the course of the past decade.

In addition, he's particularly good on the issue of funding, marketing and distribution of films. Again, the contrast between Brazil's more established industry and the evolving industries in the other countries is fascinating. There's no doubt that any European filmmaker ought to be inspired by the tales of the likes of Trapero, Martel, Alonso, Scherson, Larrain etc, as they recount the way in which they overcame the financial obstacles to get their films made.

Matheou's book is a useful if frustrating guide to Latin American Cinema. He's seen the films and he brings a whole host of names to the reader's attention, even if his remit feels less ambitious than it might have been.

bal (w,&d. kaplanoglu; w. köksal)

Bal, which translates as Honey, won a significant prize at the last Berlin film festival. It was interesting to note the amount of Germans who worked on this film, presumably in part due to the German finance deals which got it made. The film itself tells the relatively straightforward story of a young, unconfident boy, Yusuf, whose father one day vanishes when off on a long trip in search of honey. There's an ecological aspect to his fate: the reason he's been forced to search further afield is that the bees are vanishing from his usual stamping grounds. The suspense element is generated by the question of whether Yusuf's dad is going to come back or not, something the opening sequence rather gives away.

Bal is beautifully observed and filmed; Yusuf's rural world is at the very margins of Europe, a place where mobile phones and the internet have yet to make an appearance. It's a rural community, but one which does not seem to be particularly poor: the family are seen to be eating well and live in a spacious house on the edge of their village. The reasons for Yusuf's reticence at school, where he aspires but fails to be one of the better readers, overcome by a stutter whenever the moment comes, are never really explored: he's just the way he is. At one point, when looking for his father, he's taken by his mother to a fair, where people have arrived in their cars to dance and trade: for a second the audience is given a glimpse of the wider world to which Yusuf is connected, with traditions and commercial possibilities his parents' straightforward life never normally touches.

The advantages of their life seem obvious: their home would make for a hippy dream house, tucking away in steep wooded hills. The disadvantages are, however, also clear: if something happens to you and you're a long way from home, no-one's going to come and help. Whether there's a more subtle commentary on Turkish life at work I couldn't really tell. Bal may be a beautiful film, but it's also so inoffensive it makes you wonder what the filmmakers, financiers et al were trying to achieve.

point blank (d fred cavayé, w cavayé & lemans)

Someone somewhere must have known when allocating the English Language title of this film that it was thereby alluding to another film made in the late 60s by John Boorman. Perhaps it was a marketing exec, reasoning that this might drag in punters through association, subliminal or otherwise. If that is the case, one can only say, as ever, don't listen to the marketing men. Next they'll be calling any old remake 'The Italian Job', perpetrating the spurious notion that it's on a par with the original, etc etc.

It's a curious aspect of French cinematic culture that they love a corny old policier. It's a fierce strand that has run through the country's cinema over the course of fifty years, perhaps more. Godard played around with it, and before that Becker and Melville created their classics. Much of Chabrol's work is crime drama, and in recent years there's been the likes of Mesrine, various Audiard movies, Tavernier movies... The list goes on. Much of this is self-consciously inspired by or in reaction to US culture. It's almost as though there's a perceived need to provide a counterweight to the notion that the French are a bunch of arty, philosophical types, who make noodly films and refuse to invade Iraq.

Cavayé's film belongs to this tradition. Unfortunately, when the French ape the US, like almost all apeing of other cultures, it doesn't do anyone any favours. Cavayé appears in Point Blank to be attempting to make a rollicking, action adventure movie with twists and turns galore, a kind of on-speed version of 24, only with a mature 'adult' relationship at its core. The consequences are not hard to guess. This is like a steak-frites cooked by Macdonalds, with neither the horrific trashiness of the latter (something which at his best, Tarantino pulled off) or the quality control of the former.

Of course, the French crime dramas which work are those which are unafraid to drop in a dash of philosophy/ introspection. Le Samourai is a small masterpiece; The Prophet is perhaps a little self-consciously brilliant, but has its particular brand of brilliance none-the-less. The French can do crime drama; they just need to keep to their own titles and inject it with a French sensibility (whatever that means) rather than a heavy dose of ketchup.

beginners (w&d mike mills) & ballast (w&d lance hammer)

My week has been bookended by Brixtonians taking me to the movies. It began with Ballast, Hammer's seemingly low-budget, cinema verite investigation of low-rent lives in the modern Deep South, and concluded, (if the week is deemed a short one) with Mills' LA tale of loss and love. The contrast between the two films seems beguiling; both made by would-be indie US filmmakers, one seemingly outside the system (even though he has made his money out of doing artwork on the Batman franchise), the other seemingly within the system (even though his first film was an 'indie' hit.) The likelihood is that Mills and Hammer come from similar places and perhaps their movies have more in common than at first appears.

Ballast might well be termed moody. It's a sparse telling of the tale of a disfunctional family. The film opens when Lawrence, a lugubrious, large-boned black man, shoots himself after the suicide of his twin brother. Thereafter, he recovers, and his brother's son, James, enters his life. James' mother and father weren't talking and James has grown up thinking the worse of his absentee father, feelings he transfers to his uncle, whom he initially confronts with the gun he's stolen from Lawrence, the same gun Lawrence used to shoot himself. As the film unwinds, James, Lawrence and James's mother, Marlee, work out a way of living together. The piece is shrewdly edited, with the pieces of the puzzle slowly coming together as the audience comes to terms with the connections. It's also well shot by Lol Crawley, who lends an overcast pallor to proceedings. Under the influence of the Dardennes brothers, the film wears its earnestness on its sleeve. Still, it's not your standard US fare, and the film's real strength is its storytelling, as it weaves its story out of very little material into something that succeeds in holding the audience's attention. The intention seems to be to convey something approximating normality and make it watchable: to deliver the opposite of the Hollywood dream.

Beginners, on the other hand, is set in a lush-looking LA, with two fetching leading actors, whose lives seem by and large quite far removed from the normal. Oliver is mourning the loss of his father, who after the death of his wife came out and acquired a new life with a sparky Latino boyfriend. He then meets Anna, who occupies one of those infuriating non-parts: a French actress who lives between LA and NY, never seems to do anything, and has some problems with her dad, who phones her up and tells her he wants to kill himself. They run around LA and fall in and out of love and back again. It's all fairly vacuous, and once again would seem to have a strong European influence. This is post-Soderbergh, post-Godard, with McGregor and Laurent as Belmondo and Seberg. As with most imitations, its pallid. The film uses the image of its stars to convey its message: Ewan looks unhappy, therefore he must be; Melanie looks tortured, therefore she must be. There's nothing really going on, and once the love affair has been established, it has nowhere to go except to wait for Ewan's gay dad to pop his clogs, which of course he does, towards the end. Disappointingly for a director who has made his name making independent cinema, there doesn't seem to be any real ambition beyond presenting images for the eyes which seem to be alluring. There are plenty of them, and so there should be, but if you ever wanted proof that film has to be about more than just pretty pictures, Beginners will do it for you, largely because it seems to be trying so hard to convince its audience that it possesses a profundity it clearly doesn't actually own.

However, in keeping with Ballast, Beginners has made a virtue of its editing and its cinematography, as well as throwing in some cute animation for good measure. Clearly, Beginners can indulge all of this because that's all it aspires to be: well produced. Ballast on the other hand is trying to describe the reality of living in the US in a more 'authentic' way. It attempts to demystify the film process: longer takes, little fancy lighting (one scene which is over-lit, when Lawrence makes a pass at Marlee at the kitchen window, stands out like a sore thumb) and a concerted effort not to use the machinations of cinema to glamourise the images the film is capturing. Of course, it can't quite succeed: the opening shot, for example, of James sending a flock of birds into the sky has a dirty beauty Andrea Arnold would have been proud of.

The trouble with Hammer's approach is that only the cinema tragics went to see his film (which in spite of its low-budget vibe still cost $700 000 according to IMDB). The stars should guarantee Mills' effort some kind of audience, even if in commercial terms the issues of being gay and death might seem 'risky'. There doesn't seem to be much space in Anglo-Saxon culture for a cinema which seeks to use the medium as an agency of investigation or reflection of its society. Ballast makes a worthy effort, but Beginners shows up the shallowness of an industry which doesn't seem to know what it's there for, on anything other than a commercial basis.

Which is hardly a radical conclusion and suggests the whole premise of this joint review has revealed very little except for if you have a spare hour and a half and need to make the choice between the two films, choose Ballast. It's less fluffy, but it's got more body.